


i just wanna die anywhere else

by OverlyCheerfulRat



Category: Descendants (Disney Movies)
Genre: Ableism, Caretaking, Child Neglect, Disabled Character, Friendship, Gen, Graphic Description of Corpses, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Isle of the Lost (Disney) is a Terrible Place, Mental Health Issues, United States of Auradon (Disney) Is Not Perfect, mal is kind of a bitch but that's bc this is uma's pov, they just be kinda not vibing bro :/, yeah the title is a reference to night in the woods and what of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:28:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25810615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OverlyCheerfulRat/pseuds/OverlyCheerfulRat
Summary: Uma takes care of her boys.
Relationships: Gil & Harry Hook & Uma
Comments: 6
Kudos: 89





	i just wanna die anywhere else

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ratgrandpa2000](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ratgrandpa2000/gifts).



> it's descendants hours again lads

There was no graveyard on the Isle. Bodies lay where they fell until someone tossed them in the ocean, shoved them in a dumpster, burned them. 

When Uma was six, she crawled through a broken window and found a dead man on the floor. He'd been dead so long the smell was gone, and a halo of melted flesh surrounded his partially bare skull. She looked at his face, at the leathery skin clinging to his jaw, and then she looked at his hand, at the knife he must have died holding. 

"When you die, your skin falls off and your organs melt and it all pools around you," she told Harry and Gil that night. "And it makes a stain, so even after they move you, everybody still knows you were there." The boys, her boys, nodded like she'd said something of grave importance. 

They were sitting on the steps of some building, Uma on the one above the boys, so they had to look up at her. She liked it when people looked up at her- she was tiny from malnourishment, often mistaken for four instead of six, but so was every other child on the Isle. When she got older, when she could fight and steal better, she'd eat more and get bigger. Until then, she sat on the step above her boys, and they looked up at her.

Ursula didn't know what her daughter did. As soon as Uma could walk, she was on her own. She stumbled around the chip shoppe on unsteady legs, begged food from customers, stole from them when they weren't looking, and slept on a nest of blankets under the counter. Most days, she went outside to avoid her mother and made up games to play with pieces of wood broken off from the docks.

When she was three, a little boy toddled up to her and sat down, sucking his thumb. He watched her arranging the dock wood and then hesitantly reached for a piece, flinching back when she slapped his hand away. "You gotta ask," she told him huffily, and he blinked.

"My daddy said not to a-"

"I said you gotta ask! An' they're my toys!" Uma snapped. The boy's eyes welled with tears, and she grumpily added, "I'd say yeah if you just ask."

"Can I play?"

"Yeah."

He came back the next day, and then it became routine, the two of them sitting next to each other and shaping splinters into patterns. His name was Harry, he was three (almost four, he added proudly), and he was going to be a pirate when he grew up. "He's my best friend," she informed the nice woman who came to the chip shoppe every Saturday. 

"He listens to you?" the woman asked. She was short, and she had been plump before the Isle. Once, she'd worn a crown and sat a throne, but the only reminder of those days was the heart pattern on her faded red gown. "You need a boy who obeys you. Remember, you're going to be a queen one day." Uma smiled and nodded at the madwoman who thought she was still royalty, who told her fantastical stories about a place where the flowers talked and people could be tall as trees or small as ants.

Harry did listen to her. He did what she said without question and happily trotted along after her everywhere she went. Eventually he started following her home in the evenings and joined her in her blanket nest. They lay on the wood floor, listening to the waves beneath them, snuggled together for warmth in winter and security in summer. 

They were four when they met Gil. He was lost in the stalls of the market, where they'd gone to steal apples- living in Ursula's shop meant they had food, but never fruit, even the bitter half-rotten fruit that was sent to the Isle. "Have you seen my brother?" the boy called to no one in particular, and Uma saw the fear on his face. They didn't end up finding Gil's brother, so they brought him back to Ursula's shop, and from then on there were three of them sleeping under the counter.

As they got older, Uma noticed the other children forming gangs, sharing their parents' weapons and fighting their own enemies. A girl named Mal, rumored to be the offspring of a fairy and a god, led a group of hellions through the streets, stealing everything they could and breaking what they couldn't. Uma could have been one of them. Mal liked her, wanted Ursula's daughter on her side, but she wouldn't take Harry and Gil.

Uma was eight years old when she learned why her boys adored her so much. She'd never cared that Harry scratched his face until he bled, that he sometimes sat still and stared at the wall for hours, that he whispered to himself about things only he understood, that he screamed for no reason she could see and heard people in his head. She'd never cared that Gil couldn't tell left from right, that he often needed her to repeat herself, that he forgot things so quickly, that he had trouble getting dressed and tying knots, that he couldn't understand some things no matter how often she explained them. 

Their parents cared, she realized. It had never occurred to her to wonder why Gaston and Hook never brought them home- they were easy to find. And Mal cared. "One's crazy and the other one's retarded. They can't be in my gang, they'll just slow us down," she announced from where she'd perched herself on a railing, looking down at Uma and her boys. So Uma shoved her down and ran away, Harry and Gil following her, all of them laughing. 

Mal broke her wrist when she fell, and she hated Uma after that, hated her for embarrassing her, for choosing two broken boys over what would eventually be the toughest gang on the Isle. Uma hated Mal, too, hated her for calling her boys broken, for trying to make her choose between them and some stupid little make-believe group. "We'll be a gang, just us," she told them that night, then corrected herself. "No, a crew. A pirate crew."

Other villain kids joined them, later. The ones who hadn't been welcome in Mal's gang because their parents were nobodies, or because she said they were weak. They took over a docked ship when the owner died, and those of them who had no homes slept there. Uma and her boys took the captain's cabin, marvelling at the improved sleeping conditions- a mattress was infinitely better than a pile of blankets under a cramped counter, even if it was on the floor. 

The gentle motion of the ship rocked them to sleep at night. Uma lay on her back with her hands folded over her stomach, Harry lay on her right with a hand tangled in her braids, and Gil lay on her left, face pressed into her neck. People thought they were fucking. They weren't, but from the way Harry looked at her sometimes she thought he wanted to. 

They were fifteen when everything started going wrong. Uma noticed it before anyone else, that Harry hardly ever ate anymore. When she offered him food, he declined, but he ate it when she insisted. And then he walked outside, put his finger down his throat, and vomited into the water. Uma didn't push him to eat after that, she just gently held his hands when he started to dig his fingernails into his wrist or pressed the tip of his hook against his thigh. She held him when he started screaming, ran her hands through his hair when he mumbled to himself and his eyes got wild. 

After a few weeks, she figured out that the way to get Harry to eat was to sit with him and eat at the same time without drawing attention to it. She talked to him after they ate, made sure he couldn't leave to make himself throw up. Sometimes he still refused, and once or twice Gil had held him down to keep him from running off. But for the most part, it worked, even when he wailed that it was poison and thrashed violently in Gil's grip, eyes wide with terror and tears streaming into his matted hair. 

When Gil got lost coming back from the market, when Harry hit his head against the wall until he was bleeding or someone stopped him, Uma wondered if there was anyone like them in Auradon. What did they do with people who were different, people who needed help? Did they have medicine that would get rid of the voices in Harry's head? 

When they had Ben tied up, she asked him. "What do you do with sick people, or disabled people?" He looked confused for a second, but she saw him put two and two together- the way Gil seemed a little confused about what Ben was doing there, Harry's caged animal eyes. 

"There are... facilities. Homes, places for them to go," Ben explained, and Uma's face twisted in horror.

"Like this? What, is there another island for everyone who isn't-"

"No! No, not an island, a hospital," Ben stammered. "Somewhere they can't hurt themselves or anyone else." 

"I thought you'd have medicine," Uma snapped. "But I guess that was stupid, huh? You just lock people up when you don't wanna deal with them." Ben didn't say anything, just looked away, looked ashamed. And Uma raged.

There was nowhere they could go, then. No medicine on Auradon, even if they tore down the barrier, just another prison. Harry would lose his mind if he was confined to a hospital room, and Gil wouldn't understand. How was she supposed to tell them that it would be worse in Auradon? For a second, she cursed herself for giving away that there was anything the matter with her boys, but then she remembered that Mal would have told Ben anyway, if she hadn't already.

That night, with Harry and Gil on either side of her, Uma thought about the haloed dead man in the room with a broken window. If they didn't leave the Isle, that would be them, corpses left to rot until nothing was left but a stain on the floor. No one would remember them, not the real them. Not Uma, the pirate captain who hummed under her breath when she was distracted. Not Harry, the loyal first mate who was ballerina graceful on a ship but tripped over his own feet on land. Not Gil, the devoted friend who could talk for hours about anything at all.

They'd just remember the parents, if they remembered at all: Ursula, Hook, and Gaston, who never cared about their weak, crazy, stupid children. No one would even notice if they died, no one except their crew and the madwoman who came to the chip shoppe every Saturday.

**Author's Note:**

> i always wanted them to show the queen of hearts bc her aesthetic is 11/10 but they never did so i was forced to take matters into my own hands, my own grubby little possum hands. i might explore uma's relationship with her later, but probably not knowing my dumb ass.


End file.
